I never remember any new moments anymore. Take the NCAA basketball tournament. Every year I throw myself with abandon (i.e., sit and eat and stare at a television for hours at a time, clutching my disintegrating bracket) into March Madness, especially its first couple days, and every year I almost instantly forget who did what to whom. I sort of remember Vermont upsetting Syracuse a few years ago, but that’s because I grew up in Vermont and because when the final buzzer sounded I leapt up from the couch and bashed my knee on the coffee table, which really hurt. Other than that, it’s all a Mopa-Njila-tinged haze. Yesterday, had Belmont pulled off the upset of Duke, I would have again leapt up from the couch, taking care not to bash my knee on the coffee table, and I would have bounded around my living room shouting and laughing and high-fiving myself. But probably by next year only the vaguest memory would remain. At the very end of this year’s tournament, when CBS plays the song “One Shining Moment” behind a video montage of tournament heroics, it’ll be for me like watching files get moved across a computer screen to the Recycle Bin, where they’ll remain until automated deletion. I’ve got no more room in my brain for Shining Moments. And yet, after all these years, even though I probably never saw them play, I can name eight or nine members of the 1980-81 Milwaukee Bucks without even turning over this card.
Cardboard Gods 
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